Written by

Alex Beecher

The Tennessean

Metro public schools will be joining the three largest school districts in the country in an initiative to examine racial and disciplinary disparities and find ways to improve them.

The four cities — Nashville, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — will create a network to share data and best practices in a national initiative called PASSAGE.

“We felt very confident that Nashville was the right city to put in the mix and to move forward because they were already on the move,” said Alethea Frazier Raynor, principal associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University in Rhode Island.

PASSAGE, which stands for Positive and Safe Schools Advancing Greater Equity, is supported by The Atlantic Philanthropies, a foundation that makes grants to help people it determines to have been unfairly disadvantaged.

“We will be looking at our internal practices and looking at why there are disparities based on such things as race and socioeconomic status in the school system,” said Tony Majors, assistant superintendent for student services at Metro schools. “We also want to improve on our district’s disciplinary practices.”

The initiative also requires Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools to have a community partnership with the Oasis Center, which provides services to struggling youths. The Oasis Center will coordinate a team of community members.

One goal is to address disciplinary disparities involving not only race but also gender, sexual orientation, foster care and transient family conditions.

“It fits in with a lot of things we’ve already been doing,” Majors said. “PASSAGE just gives us a four-city collaborative and a more intentional focus on discipline disparities.”